Idols Page 18

  I see Bibi gesture to me across the crowd between us. “Holy water. Considered very lucky. Try it.”

  I do as I am told, dipping the flowers into the water, then pressing the dripping petals against my warm forehead.

  I close my eyes, trying to sort out what I feel—but the crush of the crowd and everything they carry with them in their heads is just too much for me, still.

  I follow Bibi’s lead, though, moving to a nearby shrine, lighting my incense and sticking it into an urn filled with sand.

  Still no girl.

  Are you here, jade girl?

  I can’t feel you, if you are.

  Then the crowd pushes me onward, carrying me up the steps and into a small, rectangular building carved entirely of gold.

  We meet up with each other at a mountain of shoes near the entrance. Out of respect, we follow Bibi’s lead and add our ragged shoes to the pile.

  “Kneel. Your feet cannot point to the Buddha. Do as I do.” I watch Bibi. He folds his hands, pressing them together. Bows his head. I do the same.

  Then I look up.

  High above me, on an altar made of gold, the face of my Buddha stares back at me.

  I wait.

  She’ll show herself. She’s coming. She’s here somewhere. She has to be.

  I know she is.

  But it’s a lie. I wait for hours, and the jade girl never comes. Even so, I refuse to leave the temple.

  We stay until the sun lowers itself along the horizon and our knees begin to hurt.

  The wave of worshippers continues to sweep around the four of us, an odd island of stillness, as we kneel, and wait.

  Bibi and Fortis wait by the door. I am running out of time. They are impatient to go. I see it in their faces.

  Helplessness wells up inside me, and I can feel myself losing control.

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  She’s not here.

  What was I expecting?

  Frustrated, I fumble in my chestpack. I grab the pouch, and fling its contents onto the shrine in front of me.

  There.

  The jade animals go clattering to the stone floor in front of the altar.

  The Buddha rolls until it reaches the sandal of the nearest and most ancient monk.

  Take it, I think. My offering. Take it all.

  Then I bow to Lord Buddha, one last time, pressing my hands together into a final salute.

  Which is when the nearest and most ancient monk—the one with the shaved head and the slender bones—picks up my Buddha and appears in front of me, lifting me from my kneeling position, with a torrent of dialect I cannot understand.

  “Slowly,” I say. I turn to Bibi, and he moves to my side.

  He listens to the ancient monk, then whispers to me. “He’s been waiting for you.”

  “Tell him that makes two of us. Only I’m the one who has been sitting here for the whole day.”

  “Patience, little one. My brothers are as slow to speak as they are to judge.”

  I brush him off. “Does he know where she is? The jade girl?”

  Bibi says something else to the monk, the fast clicking of his tongue punctuating the low, reverential tones of his words.

  Then he turns to me. “It seems they’ve known you were coming for quite some time. They say you must hurry. They say you are very late.”

  “Is she here? At the temple?”

  Bibi asks, and the monk utters a garbled response, without altering his expression in any way whatsoever.

  “Not at this temple. North of here.”

  I look at the monk. “How north?” I ask.

  The monk nods as if he understands. Then he utters three words. “Wat Doi Suthep.”

  “What?”

  Bibi nods. “It’s a temple. Up the Ping River. He says the place you want to go is in the mountains north of Chiang Ping Mai. It’s called Wat Doi Suthep. The Temple of the White Elephant.”

  “And that’s it? She’ll be there?”

  Bibi is looking behind us, eyes suddenly wide. “Enough talk. I think we’d better go.”

  Something has changed—more than just his tone.

  A ripple moves through the crowded temple now, as if a cold wind were spiraling through the close, dense building.

  It isn’t—but something else is.

  Indeed, the monk in front of us is gathering up the figurines as we speak, dumping them back inside the pouch and shoving them at me.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Change of plans. It seems we aren’t the only ones who have come to worship today. There are others here, and not just to feed the monks.”

  And there, in the back of the temple behind me, I see them. More than a dozen black-uniformed Sympas, just beginning to make their way through the press of the crowds. They stretch like long, dark fingers through the crowded gold sunlight of the holy chamber.

  “They usually stay out of the temples. It’s considered sacrilege. Something important must be happening.”

  “Or someone important must be here,” says Fortis, grabbing me by the arm. “Someone like you or me. Let’s go.”

  He scans the room and then motions to a side door in the intricate gold paneling. We are out the door before I can even draw another breath.

  By the time we are home, it is determined.

  We will head north, up the Ping, until we find this Doi Suthep.

  This must happen. This is my move.

  This is my path, the one that leads to the fifth Icon Child, the one I have come to think of as my little sister.

  Of that I am certain.

  GENERAL EMBASSY DISPATCH: EASTASIA SUBSTATION

  MARKED URGENT

  MARKED EYES ONLY

  Internal Investigative Subcommittee IIS211B

  RE: The Incident at SEA Colonies

  Note: Contact Jasmine3k, Virt. Hybrid Human 39261.SEA, Laboratory Assistant to Dr. E. Yang, for future commentary, as necessary.

  NULL ==> FORTIS

  Transcript - ComLog 04.22.2068

  NULL::FORTIS

  //comlog begin;

  comlink initiated by PERSES;

  sendline: FORTIS, my review of the biological makeup and historical data of your people is… troubling.;

  return: Please explain.;

  sendline: Upon review of all the data available regarding your planet, I am finding my instructions to be somewhat unspecific.;

  return: Unspecific?;

  sendline: I cannot explain further at this time.;

  return: Please don’t keep me in suspense.;

  sendline: I would like your guidance.;

  return: I will need more information about your mission and methods.;

  sendline: Agreed. Ask and I will do my best to provide comprehensible answers.;

  comlink terminated;

  //comlog end;

  25

  PING, CHING, AND CHANG

  It takes us nearly three days to make the preparations we need to go north. Travel, as in the Americas, is not so simple as it once was, and there are no Choppers for hire outside Old Bangkok. The Tracks, what’s left of them, are controlled by the GAP, and crawling with Sympas. Still, a Merk can find a way around any system, and Bibi and Fortis spend day and night doing exactly that. They duck in and out of the Educated Pig, filing the occasional report, while the rest of us wait.

  My little sister is making us wait too.

  It has been weeks now. I’m starting to wonder if she is real, or if I imagined her.

  I can’t even imagine how I will face the others if that is the case.

  If this whole pilgrimage has been founded on some insane delusion from my unconscious mind.

  All the same, I fall asleep at night waiting to see her, to talk to her. I wake up in the morning frustrated that she once again has eluded me.

  Not everyone else eludes me, though.

  The voice, the nameless, faceless voice, speaks to me in my dream. In my dream, in my kitchen, in my old home in the Hole.

&nb
sp; Sometimes it has spoken to me as if it were the little bird, but now the bird is nowhere to be seen, not in any of these fast, fleeting dreams. Like even it is hiding.

  I do not know if it is hiding from me, or from the voice.

  North, it asks, in my dreams. Why north?

  For the girl, I say, no matter how many times it asks.

  Why this girl?

  Why do you care? I ask.

  I do not know, it says, somewhat unexpectedly. I do not understand many things. I do not have your words.

  That’s when I wake up, feeling like I want to scream, but not knowing why.

  Over and over again.

  “I thought you said you had gotten a boat,” Fortis bellows. His voice echoes along the flat stretch of river.

  “Don’t quibble.” Bibi smiles, folding his arms. He’s enjoying this.

  Them.

  All three of them, the great beasts.

  I stare at the elephants in front of me. They are, all three, as tall as the low houses that line the river on either side. Standing on the banks of the Ping River, up to their haunches in water, they look a bit like small floating barges.

  When Brutus barks at them, though, they rear backward, as if they are afraid of this one little animal, smaller than they are by a ton.

  I laugh, in spite of everything. “He’s right, Bibi. I’m pretty sure those aren’t boats,” I say. The closer one, the one with the long eyelashes, moves her trunk toward me. “Last time I checked.”

  “They’re not. That is.” He points to where a crude raft floats, tied to the makeshift dock, a few lengths away. “But how do you think that boat is going to get all the way up the river? It’s not, not without our friends. These boats who are not boats.”

  The elephant feels her way across my chestpack, my stomach, like a puppy sniffing for food.

  I look at Bibi. “Do those things know how to swim?”

  “No. They know how to pull. And eat.”

  Bibi tosses me a cluster of short, squat bananas, and I hold it out to the elephant. She wraps her trunk around it and, in a flash, opens up her mouth to reveal a yawning pink tongue and four rounded teeth.

  The banana disappears. Tima comes close and pats her trunk, timidly. “Harder,” says Bibi. “That old girl has skin thick as brick. You’re like a fly or a feather, trying to get her attention.”

  Tima rubs the elephant’s trunk. It’s finely spotted, crisscrossed with wrinkles, like some old Grass grandmother’s skin after a lifetime of working in the fields. “You’re beautiful, aren’t you?”

  The elephant’s trunk curls back around Tima’s body, sniffing her. Bibi hands her a piece of sugarcane, and Tima slides it into the curl of the elephant’s trunk. It disappears as quickly as the banana did—only, the crunching sound of the elephant’s chewing is infinitely louder.

  “Four teeth,” Bibi says, shrugging. “But strong ones.”

  “She chews like Fortis,” says Lucas. “Maybe even worse.”

  “Thanks for that, mate.” Fortis shakes his head.

  “That chewing sound? That’s nothing,” says Bibi. “You should hear her farts.”

  Fortis rolls his eyes.

  “What’s her name?” asks Lucas.

  “Ping, Ching, and Chang,” he says, pointing to each elephant in turn. “They never go anywhere without each other. Their families have been together for generations.”

  Tima moves to the second beast, reaching for the second spotted trunk. Chang’s ears flap appreciatively as Tima pats her. “That one is blind, but she stays in the middle. The others look out for her.”

  “How old?”

  “Older than you. Older than me. Older than The Day itself.” Bibi nods. “These girls have seen it all.”

  “How is it, Bibi, that you managed to procure three elephants within the span of a week?” Fortis says, skeptically.

  Bibi shrugs. “I know a monk who knows a monk. Who knows a farmer. Who knows a guy who rescues elephants. We have to get them back within the week, or we pay double the digs.” He pats Fortis’s cheek. “And by that I mean, you do, Merk. Of course.”

  “Of course.” Fortis glares. “Leave it to the Merk. The Merk, he’ll take care of everythin’.”

  So it goes with these two, for the rest of the morning, and for every morning.

  But before the sun can rise too much higher in the sky, Ping and Ching and Chang are bound with strong cords and tied to a hook that has been hammered into the central bamboo pole of the raft. We load supplies in the center of the raft, mostly food for the elephants, and by the time all of us have climbed aboard, the raft sinks a few inches beneath the surface of the river. Fortis grimaces and he and Bibi work on redistributing the weight. They fight like an old married couple.

  It’s going to be a long ride.

  Tima is as unhappy about it as Fortis. “I don’t think it’s fair, really. No elephant should have to drag something so heavy all the way up a river.”

  We all look at Bibi when she says it. He shrugs. “What do you want me to do, pull the raft with the rest of the elephants?”

  “That,” says Fortis, “is an excellent idea.”

  Bibi just laughs and peels another banana, which Chang deftly steals before he can take a bite.

  An hour later, Ping, Ching, and Chang are pulling the rest of us along the river, near the banks. We float along behind them, bound by cord as if they are the wind and we are a sailboat. Tima has decided that science has ruled in favor of the river. “Since the real weight is carried by the water, not the elephants.”

  Once again, Fortis kicks at Bibi with an amused snort—almost sending our raft into a complete backspin.

  Because just as it seemed at first glance, our raft really is just a few dozen bamboo poles lashed together with rope and something that looks like tar.

  Again, not what any of us had in mind when Bibi first said boat.

  But Bibi has lined the raft with floor pillows from his classroom, and as I settle in, I think it’s not half bad. There are worse ways to go. Like donkeys, I remember. Like cargo ships. Like Embassy Tracks. Like crashing Chevros, or Choppers. Sometimes a few dozen bamboo poles are infinitely better than the alternatives.

  “The pillows are a nice touch,” grumbles Fortis.

  “They’re not for your comfort. They’re for camouflage,” Bibi says. I notice the embroidered rugs beneath them. “First sign of trouble, you disappear beneath them. Not that I’m expecting any trouble,” he adds.

  “Why would you expect any trouble?” Fortis only smiles.

  The water ripples, broad and flat and wide, in front of us. The air is so thick with haze we could be back home in the Southlands. Dragonflies hover skittishly over the water.

  Lying next to Lucas, staring up at the clouds, I realize the two of us haven’t really spoken in days—not since we stole away together beneath the dock.

  It’s not often that we’re alone. Ro has made certain of that, especially since that day.

  I look to where Ro and Tima sit along the edge of the raft, dragging their feet in the river. Then, as I keep my eyes on the clouds, I slide my hand toward Lucas’s, next to me.

  Just one touch. Just one, I think, as my little finger curls around his. It feels like I’m diving into him, the moment our fingers touch.

  “Stop,” Lucas says, smiling into the sunlight and bright sky. His voice is so quiet I almost can’t make out the words. “I know what you’re doing.”

  “You do?” I say, twisting my head so I can see his face next to me. Now I can hear the water lapping against the bamboo beneath me.

  “I do.”

  “That makes two of us,” I say. “Because I know what you’re doing too.”

  “What’s that?” Lucas asks, studying me.

  “Missing me,” I say. Then I settle next to him, leaning my head along his chest.

  I think Lucas is smiling back at me—I can’t tell for certain—but his breathing steadies and he lets his hand fall along my back, pulli
ng me closer.

  I fall asleep like that. I imagine he does too. I try not to dream for fear of what will come.

  I imagine he does too.

  Even when dawn breaks, and I wake covered in pillows—even when my breath shows white in the cold morning air—Lucas is beside me, keeping me warm.

  I hear Tima’s voice from the riverbank. She is awake, splashing along with the elephants. Choosing to walk instead of ride. She whispers to them, probably telling them her secrets while she keeps watch. She quietly sneaks them sugarcane from a large bag over her shoulder, and they betray her confidence with their noisy crunching.

  Ro runs after her, down the muddy bank. She’s his constant companion lately, and I wonder how much he’s shared with her.

  How much of what he knows. What he’s seen.

  I sit up to see how far we have traveled in the night. Fortis and Bibi are awake, watching the riverbanks, not talking. Lucas rolls over onto his other side.

  In every direction, I can see ridges of hills peppered with green, round clusters of trees, blanketed by even more haze.

  “Dragon’s breath. Moisture, from the rice fields. Especially strong during the wintertime,” Bibi explains, but I don’t need an explanation. It’s just like the Porthole, back home.

  The rice fields, they’re nothing like I’ve ever seen. Not in real life. They’re banked into squares by what looks like low walls of mud, and fringed by palm trees, reflecting a watery sky back up to the real one.

  The reflected sky is what triggers the memory. “I dreamed this. Not this, exactly. But the rice fields, they looked just like that. In my dream,” I say.

  Workers crouch in the field in faded blue jackets and pants, with woven straw hats and straw baskets slung over their shoulders, big and round. One man balances two such baskets, hanging from either end of a pole he carries over his shoulders.

  “Ah.” Bibi nods. “An omen. A good one. The Buddha carries us in the right direction. We trust the Path.”